"June 2017 was the first month that Python was the most visited tag on Stack Overflow within high-income nations," said David Robinson, a data scientist at Stack Overflow, in a blog post. "This is especially impressive because in 2012, it was less visited than any of the other 5 languages, and has grown by 2.5-fold in that time."

Python also happens to be the fastest growing programming language in low-income nations, though in such places it was less popular in 2012 than alternatives and didn't start to grow rapidly until 2014.

Robinson acknowledges that interest in some programming languages tends to be seasonal. He points to Java, which is often taught in undergraduate programming courses and thus tends to rise when schools are in session and fall during summer break.

Interestingly, TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript developed by Microsoft, is also seeing significant growth in terms of Stack Overflow visits. TypeScript can be used to write Node.js applications, and is preferred for the popular Angular framework. ®